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Localized Lightning for Thunderbird 60 on Linux

Non-English Linux users of Lightning, the calendar extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, must be having a hard time these days.

Both Thunderbird and Lightning are available from the major Linux distributions’ software repositories. However, with the exception of Debian, the Lightning extension from these repos are available in English only.

Most non-English users at this point would look to Lightning from the Thunderbird add-ons site. Versions available here are only compatible with Thunderbird 52 or older though and stop working in Thunderbird 60.

Some would suggest installing a beta version of Lightning, available from Mozilla’s archive site, that is compatible with Thunderbird 60. This works, but using beta software isn’t ideal.

Until Mozilla and the Linux distros figure this out, if you are one of the affected users, there are two ways to obtain a release version of Lightning for your preferred locale:

Extract Lightning from a Thunderbird release download

Download the Linux (or Linux 64-bit, either one will work) version of Thunderbird for your language from the Thunderbird site. This should be a .tar.bz2 archive.

Note: Specific versions of Lightning are paired with specific versions of Thunderbird. If you are not using the latest version of Thunderbird (60.2.1 at the time of this writing), you can download the release package for your version at Mozilla’s archive site.

Expand the .tar.bz2 archive, and in the thunderbird/distribution/extensions directory, you will find the .xpi package for the Lightning extension ({e2fda1a4-762b-4020-b5ad-a41df1933103}.xpi).

Download Lightning from my Dropbox shared folder

In the interest of saving time, I’ve already extracted Lightning for every available language. Select the version of Thunderbird you are using, then download Lightning for your locale: